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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

>"What happened to Don't be Evil?" I asked. "I don't think corp dev got the memo," he replied.

Why is it that every company that starts with good intentions eventually succumbs and becomes that which they claimed to not like?

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I'm of the opinion that it's a mistake to think of companies as anything other than machines that maximize profit. Positive slogans, company values, donations to this cause or public support for that cause - it's all there to generate good feeling and thus maximize profit.

I don't say that to be cynical, I think using that as a mental model really clarifies how we should approach corporate regulation. Saying a company "should" do this or that is no more useful than saying my laptop "should" do this or that. They will try to maximize profit, we ( the public) need to find ways to make negative activity unprofitable. Hauling Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress doesn't do anything, we need to get into the machine and change the way it works.

If you're genuinely asking: when companies get controlled by greedy people then morals take a back seat compared to financial gain (for those people). The greedy people have the money, they can structure society using the power they have because of it, they can corrupt others (who are also greedy) to support them. The people whose ancestors weren't as greedy, or lacked the violent capabilities to satisfy their greed, lack the resources to oppose the greedy. The greedy people get rewarded with more power to continue being greedier; they pass on their moral outlook and power to those who are similarly greedy.

The pattern seems to be that after a lifetime of wealth acquisition one buys a cloak of respectable benevolence by donating a fraction of that wealth to good causes (which you'll probably carefully choose to provide the best tax benefits and as a marketing tool to help the next generation of super-wealthy to get a good start).

Any company prepared to be sold off, if profitable, will be acquired by greedy people.

People who want a quiet unassuming life living in harmony with those around them don't acquire the wealth in the first place, they have the morals to run companies for good, they don't have the wealth to acquire them.

Capitalism appeals to [immoral] greed, it's a natural successor to feudalism.

For the same reason many companies software gets lower quality over time. They grow and hire people who don't care. Everyone who did care leaves to start their next company that cares.

Evolution and survival of the fittest. On a long enough time scale, all the companies which don't behave psychopathically are outcompeted and replaced by the ones which do.

As my economics teacher repeated probably 20 times in one semester: the purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder's wealth

Your economics teacher was wrong.

The purpose of a corporation is to fulfill their chosen corporate mission. Corporations are no more bound to choose financial accumulation _above all else_ than are any of the people that form those corporations.

Cooperatives and public interest companies are corporations, for example.

you should probably ask for a refund

> Why is it that every company that starts with good intentions eventually succumbs

There isn't much money in good intentions.

There's a good documentary about this called "The Corporation". It compares a corporation to a psychopath or sociopath. Corporations don't have ethics and morals - people do.

But people in groups also don't have morals or ethics because being in the group allows them to not take responsibility for their actions, ie, "the group decided", not "I decided".

That just hasn’t been my experience. Most industries have a sense of right and wrong. That sense is certainly informed by market dynamics, but it’s still there.

It’s also often propagated by big players who are thinking long term. In practice it tends to favors insiders over disrupters.

Think Facebook suddenly caring about consumer privacy.

But that doesn’t mean it’s fake. Many people at Facebook honestly do care about consumer privacy.

When your metric is dollars... what else could happen?

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